“Snakethieves,” he spat out.
When I reached the part about recognizing Luc Fiat, Rudee stopped me. “You must be mistaken, Mac; Fiat works for the mayor’s office, and he is in charge of the campaign to polish up Paris.”
I tried to tell him that I really was sure, but I had to admit that I hadn’t been that close to Fiat on the day of the rally. When Sashay said, “It was very dark on the balcony, non?” I started to wonder myself what I had seen.
As Rudee switched on the headlights and eased back into the traffic, I asked about “Shadowcorps.” He glanced at Sashay in the mirror and said, “That’s the monstrous new building in Les Halles, isn’t it? The ugly-as-snot light-reflecting one?”
She wasn’t listening, instead looking out the window at the couples laughing arm in arm as they walked past the lights of the late night brasseries and bars.
Rudee caught my eye in the mirror and added, “I’d avoid that place like the flu, Mademoiselle Mac.”
We dropped Sashay off outside the scarf museum and returned to Rudee’s rooms at the Église Russe. “Hungry?” he asked, and without considering what that might bring, I said, “Yes, starving!”
He served himself a bowl of something pungent and steamy and made me a sandwich and a salad of some-thing called mâche, which was better than it sounded, with cherry tomatoes. Had food ever tasted this good before? He chopped a pear and placed it between us.
“So, you see a career for yourself as a cigarette girl, Mac?” He grinned at my look of disgust as I recalled the scene at the club and sniffed my hair and clothing. “Well, at least as a detective.” He seemed pleased with the evening’s efforts. “But that’s it for your little sniffer. I will call Magritte in the morning and let him know everything.”
To me it felt like a jigsaw puzzle in which we’d found a few pieces that fit together, but even the frame was scattered in bits.
I climbed the steps to my room and fell onto my bed. Maybe it was the fact that my hair was over my face and smelled like an ashtray that woke me up some hours later, but I couldn’t get back to sleep. I stared out the window at the now-quiet city and watched the light revolving around the Eiffel Tower, hoping it might lull me to sleep, but instead it was my thoughts that spun slowly. I pulled on my jacket. Maybe I’d just catch a little night air. Of course, I had a pretty good idea of where Les Halles was. I tiptoed past Rudee, snoring happily, his hands in his gloves resting on the blanket, keeping the music in.
Thirteen
The shops at Les Halles were long closed, but there were lots of stragglers on the streets in the area, some stumbling home from a long night of lifting glasses and emptying them, some looking for a quiet doorway to rest in until morning. This was a different Paris than the one I’d been shown so far, sadder and lonelier.
At night, with the lights out in the shops, the buildings looked the same, except for the old churches, dark and silent. I was about to give up, thinking what a crazy idea this was, wandering the city by myself at night, when a pair of truck headlights blinded me for a moment before turning down a narrow dead end street. If it hadn’t been for the lights of the truck reflecting off its shiny surface, I would have missed seeing the building altogether. Then I saw the sign in raised letters above the steel doors: SHADOWCORPS.
The building was like a shadow itself, seeming to have no real shape in the darkened street, just a presence, and not a very pleasant one. The back of the truck opened, and two men got out and began unloading long, heavy-looking identical crates. The doors of Shadowcorps opened, and three more men emerged, one barking orders at the others as they assembled a conveyer belt that led into the building. I tucked myself into a doorway and watched them work with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. As they finished emptying the truck, curiosity took over for the moment, and I inched down the wall beside the truck, hoping that they would be too busy and it would be too dark for them to notice me. Four of them struggled with the conveyer belt, trying to fold it up, and the one giving orders stepped away from the doors and snorted, “Can’t do anything right without me, can you, you bunch of lugs?”
As they groaned and tugged, I saw my chance and slipped unnoticed into the foyer of Shadowcorps. A vacant reception desk provided the only hiding place. I told my breath to hold steady as the three men rolled their cargo on huge dollies around a corner and out of sight. I didn’t dare look, but I heard elevator doors opening and closing and the sound of wheels and muffled voices, then nothing more. I waited for the silence to last a minute or so before quietly unfolding myself from behind the reception desk. My eyes slowly got used to the dark, cavernous lobby. It was completely empty — no plants, no directory, no signs telling you where to go, no chairs, no lamps, nothing. Even the reception desk was as naked as a landing strip. What kind of business went on here? And what was in those boxes?
My curiosity pulled me along to a set of elevator doors behind a wall that divided the entry area. The arrow above the gleaming silver doors pointed to minus five, and I stared at the dial, not understanding. With the exception of G for ground, all the floors were marked with a minus. The air seemed to blow around me like I was in a tunnel that went up and down, then it hit me — this building was completely and totally empty. I pushed the “down” button and waited, hoping that no one else was watching the arrow move at the same time as me.
I held my breath as the doors slid open, revealing what was more like a small room than a conventional elevator. I’m not sure what I would have done if someone had been there to greet me. I got in and pushed -5. The doors opened quietly onto a small hall. Nearby I could hear the sound of voices and activity and a lot of machinery in action. I peered around the corner into a vast warehouse-sized room with a low ceiling lit by tubes of bluish silver lights. Men in smocks, wearing goggles and holding blowtorches, were working on a piece of criss-crossed metal hundreds of feet long in sections of about thirty feet each. Was this what was being unloaded from the truck tonight?
At the far end of the room, a cluster of workers, also wearing goggles and heavy, padded gloves, were loading a giant hook into a huge fiery oven. I was so fascinated by this activity, I almost didn’t hear the elevator doors hissing open behind me. I looked around frantically for a hiding place and had to take what I could find. I jumped behind a large rack on wheels, hung with cables, torches, and other tools that didn’t look at all like the ones my grandfather kept in his garage. I crouched as low as my body would go. The crunch of three sets of footsteps stopped no more than a few feet from where I was hiding. Through the cables I could see only the bottom halves of their bodies, dressed in black, of course. It must be in season here. I spotted the shoes of the man in the middle of the little group. Actually, they weren’t shoes at all, but highly polished silver cowboy boots, a sight that was becoming all too common for my liking.
“Did you remember to feed the gargoyles, Phlegm?” wheezed a familiar voice that I recognized as belonging to the bony-handed Shadow from the club.
“Yeah, bones and all, Scar,” the other Shadow replied. “Looking good, Louche. Every construction crew in Paris would want to run this baby.”
A third voice I’d heard at the table of ghosts added, in his own special hiss, “Except we’ll be doing some deconstruction.” If a snake could laugh, I think I knew then what it would sound like.
They moved closer to the work in progress, and I heard Louche, or Luc as I was sure he was, saying, “Yesss ... ouiii” approvingly as he examined what I now understood was a giant crane. He stepped up onto a workbench, steadied by a couple of his henchmen. The blowtorches were lowered, and the buzz of machinery slowed as he smiled and gestured at the proceedings. “Well done, my friends. The Shadows always work late, n’est-ce pas?” A ripple of quiet laughter reverberated in the huge room.